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RE: So IOW, it's just as I suggested?

No, it has to do with AUDIBLE distortion. Your ear/brain have certain filters and masking processes that work wonders on removing the audibility of certain types of distortion but products that have other profiles will be exposed. Psychoacoustics is an interesting field and it leads to some rather interesting conclusions such as THD and IMD are essentially meaningless when it comes to listeners observation of what SOUNDS distorted or clean to them. Geddes found no correlation and even a slight downward trend.

Cheever went further and said that it is the harmonic components and their correct weighting that gives the best prediction and derived his equation from what is known about masking of low order harmonics and the ears own self-generated distortion.

If designers were to use psychoacoustic tools for designing their gear there would probably be a lot more good sounding gear.

The argument a lot of the extreme measuring products have is that they have pushed the distortion so low that it is "inaudible" and therefore the whole psychoacoustic issue is moot. However, there is sufficient evidence in the scientific and engineering literature that suggests that using huge amounts of negative feedback to suppress distortion harmonics damages the sound in other ways that are quite difficult to measure and won't be obvious from standard measurements. As Mel stated high feedback designs tend to sound threadbare and sometimes even harsh. Is that just revealing the "warts and all" of the recordings? If so, there are a lot of bad recordings out there. Even really good ones will suffer from this treatment. In other words, how you achieve a result is also affecting the end result...its more path dependent rather than state dependent and this is primarily due to the fact that our hearing is more than a little bit complicated...and not at all like a microphone and oscilloscope.

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